


Smoke Break

by readingtoujours



Category: Carry On Series - Rainbow Rowell, Simon Snow & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Fluff, Idiots in Love, M/M, Simon is in love with Baz, Strangers to Lovers, baz is oblivious
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-29
Updated: 2020-12-29
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:41:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,310
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28414806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/readingtoujours/pseuds/readingtoujours
Summary: Based on the prompt: Person 1 follows Person 2 out for a smoke break during work, but Person 1 doesn’t actually smoke. They attempt to smoke a cigarette to impress Person 2, but they immediately start coughing uncontrollably and embarrass themself.
Relationships: Tyrannus Basilton "Baz" Pitch/Simon Snow
Comments: 3
Kudos: 17





	Smoke Break

**Author's Note:**

> This has been a WIP that I've been slowly chipping away at for way too long, so I am finally posting the beginning of it to motivate myself to finish it. Enjoy! :)

Baz shrugged his coat onto his shoulders. Simon gritted his teeth. 

It was infuriating the way that Baz could do literally anything and look like a fucking Calvin Klein model while doing it. Watching him open up a package of envelopes made Simon get flustered. Simon knew this probably meant that he was going insane -- but... just... Baz’s forearms, and his knuckles, and the way his mouth scrunched up and tilted to the side when he concentrated… 

Baz left his coat unbuttoned, but pulled it so that it wrapped tight around his sides. 

The coat looked expensive, Simon thought, just like everything else that Baz wore. Simon’s coat, which was slumped over the back of his chair, had been a gift to him a while back, and this time showed in the way that the bottom of the sleeves were frayed and the fabric was thin around the elbows. 

Baz was going out for a smoke. Baz always went out for a smoke at some point in the afternoon. It usually happened around three, which was when the lunch break felt like it had happened eons ago and yet the end of the day also felt like it was eons away. 

Before he left his desk, he tipped his chin at Simon in a very cool (and infuriatingly attractive) goodbye. 

He shared a cubicle with Simon. If Simon had to put a label on their relationship, he’d say that they were acquaintances. 

He knew everything about Baz at work, like the fact that he rubbed his (beautifully graceful) fingers up and down down his collar while he concentrated, or the fact that he only used fancy black pens, or the fact that the socks that he wore always matched his tie. He figured that Baz probably knew a lot about him, too, though he was positive that Baz didn’t have the same obsessively invested interest in Simon that Simon had in Baz… 

Simon’s best friend, Penny, limited Simon’s Baz Talk time. If she didn’t filter him, Baz would be all that he talked about. Like the time that he had invited Penny over to watch Coco but spent the entire time talking over the movie to complain about the fact that there was nothing Baz could do that wasn’t frustratingly sleek. Or that time that they went out for dinner and Simon went on and on about the color of Baz’s eyes (an infuriatingly mysterious gray) without once pausing to take a breath. 

Simon looked at the screen of his computer. It was blank. It was still blank -- it had been blank for the past twenty minutes, since Simon couldn’t get his fingers to type or his brain to think when Baz was getting his coat on and therefore twisting his back and showing a strip of skin at the waist.  
Crowley, Simon thought. Maybe he should’ve started limiting his own Baz Talk time -- Baz Think time. Baz Time. 

Ugh, who was he kidding. He didn’t have actual Baz Time. It was just his head running in circles. The most they’d ever actually interacted with each other was a quick hello. 

Aleister Crowley. Maybe he needed to take up smoking. 

Anyway. Baz had left the office after tipping his head up towards Simon. Simon had, as usual, embraced the fact that he wasn’t going to get work done, and opted instead to picture Baz with a cigarette between his fingers and the wind lightly playing with his hair… 

For some reason, every time Simon pictured Baz smoking outside of work, the image in his head was basically something out of Titanic, all dark and stormy and moody and dramatic. He couldn’t help himself; that was the kind of mental image that Baz commanded with all of his brooding and his sharp cheekbones and dramatically black hair. 

When Baz came back in, he never smelled of smoke at all, but rather something sort of musty and woodsy. That’s how Baz always smelled -- musty and woodsy -- though it was stronger right after Baz came back from his smoke break.

Simon wondered what Baz used to get that smell. Was it cologne? Probably, Simon thought. And if it was cologne, how creepy would it be for Simon to buy a bottle to keep in his apartment just to have -- and sniff every once and while?

Simon refocused his attention on his computer screen. He jiggled his mouse, just so that the computer would wake up again. There was no way he was going to be able to do work again -- not until Baz was back, not until Baz was back and had taken off his jacket and unwound his scarf and done that thing where he shook his arms so that his sleeves would fall the way he wanted them to. 

There was no way that Simon could get work done around Baz. He had somehow managed to admit this embarrassing truth to himself. Still, though, sitting at a computer that was asleep while he stared into space and let his eyes turn into literal hearts was a little too much.

All of a sudden, Simon heard footsteps behind his desk. Shit. His spine straightened immediately, and his hands flew to lie on the keyboard of his computer as though he’d been intently working this whole time. He pushed the space bar a few times for dramatic effect. There was no word document pulled up on his screen; all he had pulled up was an empty browser page. 

The footsteps got closer and then stopped. “Simon,” said a voice, presumably a voice that belonged to the same body as the feet that were responsible for the footsteps. 

It was Simon’s boss. Fuck.

“Hey,” Simon said. He adjusted his posture and clicked on whatever was closest to his mouse on his screen. It was the jpeg of a meme that Penny had sent to him; he’d saved it to his desktop. Penny had a pretty dicey taste in memes, and this particular one was one of the stranger ones Simon had received. It featured a chihuahua wearing sunglasses, and big rainbow font, and several small knives positioned in different places. 

Crowley, Simon was thoroughly fucked. He quickly jabbed the red x on the top of the browser window. The picture closed right away, but Simon’s heart was still pounding, and his hand muscles were barely connected to his brain, so he clicked the mouse a few more times which made his computer screen shudder angrily. 

His boss smiled at him, though concern weighed down the sides of his eyebrows. 

“How is it going?” his boss inquired, not unkindly.

“It’s going well,” Simon said, trying to pull his face -- which was twisted into a grimace -- into something closer to a smile.

His boss was looking at him a little strangely, probably because he was still clicking on an empty home screen with a chihuahua meme in the middle of it. Simon’s composure cracked, and without thinking twice, he grabbed his jacket and began tugging his arms through the sleeves.

“I was just leaving for a smoke break, actually,” Simon lied. 

“Right,” his boss said, and Simon couldn’t tell whether or not he believed him, but decided that he didn’t care. 

Simon finished pulling his jacket around his body and pushed his way out of the front door before his boss could stop him or ask him another question. 

In his haste, he realized, he’d forgotten to close the meme that had popped up. Well, that didn’t matter now, he decided, clambering down the short path in front of their office.

Baz was at the corner of the parking lot with a cigarette in between two of his fingers looking even better than Simon could have imagined.

Yeah, Simon decided again, watching the wind pick up Baz’s hair. That whole boss encounter really didn’t matter now.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
